April 16, 2014

FRACKING: NOT SO RISKY. “The data on hydraulic fracturing suggest that its risks are rare, but even rare risks need to be addressed. Addressing them, however, does not require oppressive regulation or production moratoriums.”

I've told my friend at the American Petroleum Institute over and over they've got to do a near spotless job of policing their own re: fracking. One incident is one too many in terms of PR and reader impression. You can't be letting rush/rush/rush wildcatters stain the entire industry. But they do. With more regularity than this report implies.

I am not aware of a fracking related incident that has been proven to have affected groundwater adversely. Am I missing something? You are correct about the PR factor, but I was not aware there had been any real problems.

I don't understand how the fluids used in fracking migrate back to the surface. If that were true, then water tables would be vulnerable. But when you drill a well, you first drill down 700 ft or so and case that hole with steel pipe with cement on the outside of it, to protect the water table, and then you drill the well. Most formations that are fracked seem to be 5,000 ft or deeper, so how do drilling fluids make it back to the surface through basically a mile of solid rock. There is a reason they are fracturing the formation, and that same principle would seem to protect the water table way up above the formation being fracked. Any oilfield engineers that can explain this?

It is not necessary to explicitly prove that fracking liquids would leak into the water table, it is merely necessary to express concern about the possibility. Proving that it can or does occur, under ordinary operating conditions, routinely is costly and your "test" might show you are wrong. As long as it is "theoretically" possible and some operators have things go wrong as always happens in wide spread operations, it is only necessary to make the claim and let the "fear of the unknown" (by the general public) do the work for the opponents.

Making the claim about ground water contamination possibility is easy. Proving that the claim is largely specious is much harder because you have to educate people about it.

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